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Saturday, 16 February 2013

Whose Hand over Hasawiya?

SUMMARY

On January 15 2013 a massacre was carried out on the small Syrian farming community of Hasawiya, located on the outskirts of Homs. Opposition sources place the total number of deaths at 105 - many of them women and children - and allege that they were carried out by regime gangs - known as Shabiha - who invaded the village along with Syrian military forces. A different version of events has been offered by the regime, which claims that the killing was done by armed rebel forces, specifically the jihadist rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra. This version was offered to visiting western journalists and backed up by the testimony of several men who were presented as survivors of the massacre.One visiting reporter and analysts who accepted the evidence which was presented to him took the view that this contradictory information made it impossible to determine who the real authors of this atrocity were.I have reviewed as much of the available information as possible, with the assistance of Syrian oppositionists inside and outside the country, and come to a different conclusion. In my view the regime account fails to pass basic tests of credibility and coherence, and was presented in a highly prejudicial setting. The opposition account is far stronger on all counts - logic, coherence, and consistency with the known facts. My conclusion is that that it is beyond reasonable doubt that this was a crime perpetrated by the regime - executed by their Shabiha, most probably working in association with the Syrian army.This is one of the most serious war crimes to have been perpetrated in Syria during the current conflict, and it is therefore to be hoped that the United Nations will carry out the sort of detailed investigation that it did over the very similar Houla massacre of June 2012, in order to establish a definitive account of the events.

Review and Analysis of the Evidence

On January 15 2013, bands
of armed men invaded the small Syrian village of Basatin al-Hasawiya and
proceeded to carry out a mass slaughter of men women and children, burning the
bodies once they were finished. On these facts there is broad agreement. But on
everything else there are two conflicting accounts.

“Reports emerging from Hasawiya of an extremely appalling massacre committed
against 13 families according to eyewitnesses. The village is about 5 kilometres
north of Homs city centre. Hasawiya’s families are well-known for being farmers; the village has a population
of about 1,500 civilians and recently had more families settling in from
disaster-stricken and invaded districts. The village includes Sunnis,
Christians, and Alawites, but the massacre is purely driven by sectarianism since all the
families massacred are Sunni families.

On Tuesday, 15 January, the regime's
military security forces entered the village at 12:00 p.m. and arbitrarily
arrested a number of men, amongst them martyr Abdul Haseeb Deyab, Imam of Al
Tayyar mosque in Hasawiya. At 1:00 p.m., some of the detainees got released. At
2:00 p.m., 2 buses (well-known by civilians for being used to drive Shabiha), 4
other security force buses, and 2 armoured vehicles arrived and parked near Al
Boushi factory for ceramics.

“Some young men were extrajudicially
executed in these houses then burnt in the house of Abu Mashhour Shehab Deyab.
They then moved into Al Ghaloul orchards and executed all the men, women, and
children found there from Al Ghaloul family. Third place was Al Deyab farmlands,
where they also executed the whole family and burnt their corpses. Their last
place was the farmlands beside Al Deyab farmlands, where they killed more than
17 members of Al Mahbani family.

“105
martyrs have been documented as executed from all these families (the names
of the dead are then provided)

Other reports described this as beginning with a raid on the village
and a search for weapons. One oppositionist was reported by Reuters as saying: “the
rebel Free Syrian Army occasionally entered the farmland of Basatin al-Hasawiya
to attack a nearby military academy. “

Two western TV crews
visited the village in the days following the killings, but their reports, far
from clarifying the picture, helped give rise to two conflicting accounts of
the Hasawiya events. I will refer to the contrasting account that emerged at
this point in time as the “regime
narrative” - but this is not a single systematic account of the events, but
has to be assembled from a number of pieces of information and testimony delivered
to the visiting western journalists. See:

Two days after the
killings, ITN journalist Bill Neely, entered the village with a Syrian army
escort. As he arrived some men appeared, apparently from hiding, and offered an
account of what had transpired that sharply differed from the opposition
version. Neely and his interpreter conducted an interview with 6 men, two of whom
took him into nearby buildings and showed him blood-stained sites where the
killings had taken place and offered details of what had happened. Neely stated
that he did not himself see any bodies because they had already been cleaned up
by the Syrian army in the area he was permitted to visit, (The army refused
access to the rest of the village on the grounds that snipers were still active.)

(The ITN report
includes what looks like an interview with a woman in her home; but on closer
inspection this turns out to be a brief clip from an opposition video that has
been edited into the report. See below for more details.)

According to the men –
or at least the three of them who spoke during the interview – the killings had
been carried out by a group of “armed men” who had arrived in the village
dressed in black and with headbands inscribed “Allahu Akhbar”. One of the witnesses
said they were from the jihadist group Jabhat al Nusra (JN). Neely was told
that they had demanded access to the roofs of houses in order to carry out an
operation against the nearby Intelligence building, and when they were refused
began systematic killings in retaliation. According to these informants the
death toll was around 30.

Neely also interviewed
the commander of the military detachment in the village and had earlier spoken
to the Governor of Homs, both of whom asserted that there had been no
deliberate killing of civilians by the Army. The Governor placed the total number
of deaths as 8 civilians (four women and four children) plus an unspecified
number of rebel fighters. He blamed the civilian deaths on “al Qaeda”
(presumably referring to JN)

The ITN report included
the names of 3 families who the informants named as victims;: these seem to correspond
to names in the opposition account.

The following day Lyse
Doucet of the BBC was able to enter the village, also under army escort. She
managed to persuade the army to let her visit a more remote set of houses
outside the village centre, where she discovered some burned corpses that the
army had not removed. The army officer accompanying her provided further
details of the official version of what had happened, stating that some 200
rebel fighters had come to the village across the surrounding fields (from what
direction is unclear).

Doucet reported that
several people she spoke to in the village in the presence of the army produced
a similar account to Neely’s informants. However she also managed to talk to
one woman out of earshot of the army and recorded a very different account:
“one woman, who spoke to us off-camera, out of earshot of our minders, told us
soldiers were there that day, and that some had apologised that others acted
without orders".

Both teams of
journalists stated that they were only reporting what they had been told and
had no way of choosing between the conflicting accounts.

acloserlookonsyria

In the following days, James
Miller for EIA
World View reviewed the available evidence and gathered some
further information from Neely. His conclusion was pretty much the same as the
journalists – there was not sufficient evidence to decide between the alternate
accounts. A similar stance was taken by acloserlookonsyria.

I have re-revisited all
the available information I can identify, with the assistance of some Syrian
opposition sympathisers, one of whom has visited Hasawiya. In my view it is
possible to compare the veracity of the two accounts with considerably greater precision
by looking closely at several factors: the conditions under which interviews
were conducted; the logic of the accounts provided; and the context in which
the alleged events took place.

Background:
The location

Hasawiya is located on
the northern fringes of Homs, and on the banks of the Orontes river. There is
some uncertainty about its physical disposition in relation to the contending
military forces in the area. According to one account (ITN) it is divided into
two parts by the river, with one side controlled by the Syrian army and the
other by the FSA, and has been used by rebel forces as a staging post for
attacks on the nearby Military Intelligence building. Lyse Doucet has described
it as: “just around the corner” from a nearby Syrian army base. A Syrian
oppositionist with local knowledge has told me that the whole area is firmly
under army control. A news report from al-Arabiya
supports this latter view with detailed information:

“The village lies within a fortified security
square, with Air Force Intelligence to the south, 800 metres from the village;
the industrial estate to the east, currently used as a military base; to the
north-east is a big military checkpoint; to the west are the military
academies, the main source for shelling Homs & its countryside.”

Collating various
sources of information, this seems to be an accurate description, and I have
mapped the key features here.Scrutinising the Google satellite images with
these facts in mind, a number of things arise:

The bulk of the
built-up portion of the village, and the areas where the killings seem to have
taken place, are on the west bank of the Orontes river; on the other side there
appear to be only fields/orchards and some dispersed buildings; this area is
also linked by road to the army’s checkpoint at Dik al Jin.

The Army intelligence
building is about 1.25km (or 0.8 miles) away from the Hasawiya fields – beyond
the effective range of small arms or rocket propelled grenades. Moreover there
is a major road and a large built up area interposed between the fields and the
Intelligence building. It is therefore unlikely that the latter could have been
effectively targeted from Hasawiya.

Howeverif , as the al-Arabiya report (supported by other sources) states, the adjoining
built up area (the al-Sinaa industrial estate) has been turned into a military
base, then that is much closer and could have been targeted from nearby
Hasawiya fields. However that would place Hasawiya quite literally “around the
corner” from the a military base

The most likely
hypothesis would seem to be that west-bank Hasawiya was not FSA controlled but at
most contested territory, with the FSA making occasional use of its fields to
the west to attack not the Intelligence building, but either the military base
in the former industrial estate to the East or the Military academy to the West
(as an opposition source has claimed). If the target was the Military Academy
then the regime narrative breaks down completely, as the nearest fields to that
zone are on the other side of the river and away from the area where the
killings took place (see map);
so to be consistent the regime account must be claiming that the target was the
military base on the industrial estate, although that leaves unexplained the
desire of the rebel fighters to gain access to village roofs, since the fields
would get them far closer to their objective.

The
setting of the ITN interview

A close review of the
ITN news story shows the following: Throughout the interviews uniformed Syrian
military are clearly visible in close proximity: an armoured personnel carrier is
the backdrop to the interviews, and when they are is taken into houses there
are uniformed personnel visible in every shot.

However there is a much
more definitive indication of the extent to which these interviews were being
monitored. Throughout the interview sequence there is a “seventh man” clearly
visible on the edge of the group: he is not in army uniform but he is wearing a
dark tunic, with epaulettes and breast and arm badges that look as if they are
air force (suggesting he is Air force Intelligence) See the figure on the right
in the two pictures below: